Scientists reported in a fascinating paper that mini brains were grown in a lab from stem cells.
Two symmetrical optic cups were seen to grow on tiny brain organoids grown in dishes. The result could help us understand the process of eye development.
The ability of brain organoids to generate primitive sensory structures that are light sensitive and harbor cell types similar to those found in the body is highlighted by our work.
Organoids can be used to study brain-eye interactions during embryo development, model congenital retinal disorders, and generate patient-specific retinal cell types for personalized drug testing and transplantation therapies.
You might think that brain organoids are real brains. They are small, three-dimensional structures that have the potential to grow into many different types of tissue.
Stem cells are grown into blobs of brain tissue without any resemblance to thoughts, emotions, or consciousness. For research purposes, mini brains can be used, but using actual living brains would be ethically difficult.
The people were looking for eye development.
The structures that develop into the entire globe of the eye can be grown from stem cells. The structures were created from stem cells.
The team wanted to see if they could grow them into brain organoids. It would be beneficial to see how the two types of tissue can grow together, rather than just being isolated.
The researchers wrote in their paper that understanding eye development could allow them to understand the basis of early Retinal diseases.
It is important to study the primordium of the eye that is attached to the forebrain.
The team changed their protocols after previous work showed evidence of cells in the eye but not in the brain.
They didn't try to force the development of purely neural cells at the early stages of neural differentiation and added retinol acetate as an aid to eye development.
The structures of the baby brains were visible for 50 days. The timing of eye development in the human embryo is consistent with this, so these organoids could be useful for studying it.
Other implications are also present. The cups contained neural networks that responded to light and even contained eye tissue. The structures showed the connections between the brain tissue and the skin of the eye.
The ability of nerve fibers to connect with their brain targets is something that has never before been shown in an in situ system.
It's possible to reproduce. The team grew 314 brain organs. The team hopes to develop strategies for keeping these structures viable on longer time-scales for doing more in-depth research.
They wrote in their paper that they were able to develop brain organoids that displayed highly specialized neuronal cell types.
These are organoids that are helping to model retinopathies.
The research has appeared in a journal.
The first version of this article was published in August of 2011.
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